In Science's Name, Lucrative Trade in Body Parts

This article was reported by Sandra Blakeslee, John M. Broder, Charlie LeDuff and Andrew Pollack and written by Mr. Broder.; Sandra Blakeslee reported from Santa Fe, N.M., for this article, John M. Broder and Charlie LeDuff from Los Angeles, and Andrew Pollack from San Francisco.

Published: March 12, 2004

LOS ANGELES, March 11—
About 10,000 Americans will their bodies to science each year, choosing a path that, in the popular imagination at least, leads to the clinical dignity of the medical school or teaching hospital, where the dead help to unveil the wonders of human anatomy or the mysteries of disease.

Few donors, it is safe to say, imagine the many other ways corpses give their all for science: mangled in automobile crash tests, blown to bits by land mines or cut up with power saws to be shipped in pieces around the country or even abroad. Few see themselves ending up in a row of trunks, limbless and headless, arrayed on gurneys in the ballroom of a resort hotel for a surgical training seminar.

Nor do many people suspect that corpses are precious raw material in a little-known profit-making industry, and that they are worth far more cut up than whole.

A scandal at the cadaver laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, has thrown back a heavy curtain that has kept this business largely hidden from public view.

The university suspended its Willed Body Program this week, and university police arrested the program's director and a man the university accuses of trafficking in as many as 800 cadavers in a six-year body-parts-for-profit scheme.

The accused middleman, Ernest V. Nelson, who has cut up and carted away hundreds of cadavers from the U.C.L.A. medical school since 1998, said the university had been fully aware of what he was doing. He transferred the human parts, for sizable fees, to as many as 100 research institutions and private companies, including major companies like Johnson & Johnson, his lawyer said.

There is little controversy in the medical community about the use of donated bodies in teaching and research, although few discuss the topic openly and many prefer not to ask where the body parts they use come from.

The parts are supplied by a largely invisible network of brokers who make handsome profits for processing and transporting human remains. Selling body parts is illegal, but there is no prohibition on charging for shipping and handling. Research doctors say the demand for bodies and parts far outstrips the supply, raising prices and encouraging a growing number of body-parts entrepreneurs. Some of these are companies that promote their ''facilitator'' services on Web sites emphasizing the great benefit to humanity a willed body provides.

These sites do not mention that a human body, particularly one in pieces, is also of considerable benefit to a broker. Delivery of an intact cadaver costs as little as $1,000, but different specialists seek out specific pieces of anatomy for their work, and individual parts can be expensive. A head can cost $500 in processing fees, according to brokers who handle such parts. A torso in good condition can fetch $5,000. A spine goes for as much as $3,500, a knee $650, a cornea $400. In 2002, a pharmaceutical company paid $4,000 for a box of fingernails and toenails.

''Until pretty recently, it was something everybody kind of knew about but didn't want to talk about,'' said Dr. Stuart J. Youngner, chairman of the department of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. ''It's icky. It's upsetting. The people who handle these things have been able to get away with stuff because nobody really wants to get into it.''

Dr. Youngner added that the interests of medicine and the people who handle the dead, legally or not, have intersected for hundreds of years and have led to recurring scandals. He cited the case of William Burke and William Hare, two Scotsmen of the 19th century whose trade in corpses was so profitable that they graduated to murder to provide fresh bodies to anatomists and university students.

Mistreatment of the Dead

In the last five years, authorities have uncovered numerous instances of mistreatment of the dead. In 1999, the director of the Willed Body Program at the University of California, Irvine, was fired for selling six spines to a Phoenix hospital for $5,000. An investigation discovered that hundreds of bodies were unaccounted for.

The director of the cadaver laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston was fired in 2002 for selling body parts to a pharmaceutical company and other entities. In 2003, Michael Francis Brown, the owner of a crematory in Riverside County, Calif., was convicted of embezzlement and mutilation of corpses. He received 20 years in prison for illegally removing and selling heads, knees, spines and other parts from bodies he was supposed to cremate. Prosecutors say he made more than $400,000 in the body trade.

Doctors and medical device manufacturers say the use of human remains is indispensable to advancing medical science. There is no substitute, they say, for unembalmed flesh in teaching a doctor how to perform laparoscopic or arthroscopic surgery, or how to repair a heart valve.

But even those who benefit from the knowledge gleaned from work on cadavers say they are troubled by the black market in body parts and the cavalier way many donated bodies are handled.